Tag Archives: automation

Anything I can do to reduce the time I have to spend dealing with otherwise time-sucking tasks gives me a happy. Currently, where I am, I have reduced our daily deployment process to a single Powershell cmdlet with a log file review. All the steps that normally went into each deployment (applying SQL scripts, data updates, updating the TFS task, sending an email that the deployment is done) are handled by Powershell, and the process accepts multiple deployments at the same time. As long as there are no errors in the log file for a deployment, there is nothing more to do. There’s an error? Run the same cmdlet with the rollback option.

I am still working on improving this process, from trying to get the error handling to work the way I want it to, to incorporating the automation of check-in to source control of the changes that were just applied. It is a work-in-progress that will continue to reduce the amount of time spent on what would otherwise be manual tasks.

This work led me to the idea for a session on Powershell and automation of processes. Join me and Pragmatic Works on Thursday, March 12th from the comfort of your own desk at 11am EST/10am CST for Beginning Automation with Powershell. This demo-heavy session will go over some different Powershell cmdlets and automation concepts that you can take and build upon in your own environment. Powershell is a tool that no DBA should work without. A development background is helpful but not necessary – what DBA would not want to spend a few hours writing code for a process that will save them from having to do a repetitive manual task over and over again? Automation frees up time for us to do other projects that we want to spend time on and grow our skill sets.

Have questions about this? Leave a comment below. See y’all there. 🙂